News You Can Bruise for 2009 March 10

(10) Tue Mar 10 2009 14:49: When I was in Boston a while back I went with Kirk to a shop of strange and wonderful things. I bought some presents for various readers of this weblog, which I will dispense when the time is right. I also bought a little flexible plastic doll of Gumby's pony pal Pokey.

This doll is pretty much identical to one I had as a kid, except this one has a URL printed on it.[0] In fact, although the doll is cool on its own (Pokey's four identical skinny legs make him much more posable than the Gumby doll's larger, unevenly sized limbs), nostalgia is the main reason I bought it. I don't buy a whole lot of things because they remind me of my childhood, but I do have several small items that I've kept for over twenty years. Things I wouldn't stop to save during a fire but that I would put low on my list of things to throw away if I had to throw away a bunch of things, even though they're not useful and have no monetary value.

I bring this up because the Pokey purchase made me interested in what things you, my readers, have bought recently for nostalgic reasons. Or, alternatively, what things you hold on to for nostalgic reasons.

I'll do one of each. I still have a rabbit puppet (copyright date on tag 1976) which was not my first stuffed animal, but which was my first non-lame stuffed animal. I had an earlier stuffed rabbit, but it was this ugly orange cartoony thing that I'm sure I loved dearly at the time but not anymore. It's either long gone by now, or else my niece has it. The rabbit puppet resembles a real rabbit, still looks good after 30 years, and in general puppet stuffed animals are better than non-puppets.

[0] It's a strange URL to put on a toy, because the website is aimed at resellers, not the people who buy the toys. What's the use case here? "The store down the street is crushing me with these Pokey dolls! I've got to find out where they come from! Hopefully, they'll have a low minimum order!"

(1) Tue Mar 10 2009 17:38: The thing that jumped out at me from this review of early roguelikes XRogue and Advanced Rogue is that XRogue could be the first and only roguelike in which you get to fight trilobites.

(1) Tue Mar 10 2009 19:50: What is the Prime Directive, really, but a very strict anti-spoiler policy?

(3) Tue Mar 10 2009 22:08 A Boy And His Buildings: There's a remake in the works of A Boy and His Blob, the game that should be one of my all-time favorites. Its awesome mechanic takes the kind of operations you get by typing or clicking in a text or graphical adventure, and makes them digetic. But it was ruined by terrible game design. Exactly the scenario where a remake makes sense.

As is well-known the original game takes place in Hoboken, New Jersey. The remake starts off with the same lovely view of a skyline across the water, but it's been Standards-and-Practiced and it's not the New York skyline anymore. In fact I don't think it looks like a real city skyline at all; the city would have to have two or three downtowns. Way to ruin the realism, game about a shapeshifting blob!

(If there is a real city with a skyline like that, I'd consider that a more interesting fact than you'd think, so let me know. I guess I could see the New York skyline looking like that if you rotated Central Park 90 degrees.)